The Killing Sea (15 page)

December 26, 2004,
dawned bright over the calm Indian Ocean. At 7:59 a.m. local time, deep in the sunless depths one hundred miles off the west coast of Sumatra, an ocean bed fault ruptured for hundreds of miles. An area of seafloor the size of California sprang up as much as twenty-five feet, shoving upward several dozen cubic miles of ocean.

This created a powerful series of waves that in the deep ocean traveled as fast as a jet plane, barely disturbing the surface with their two-foot ripples. When the wave train reached coastal areas, it slowed down. With all that volume of displaced water racing into increasingly shallow water, some of the waves grew to enormous size. Aceh, in northern Indonesia, was the
first landmass to be hit, approximately twenty minutes after the quake; it was estimated that the tallest of the waves that struck was a hundred feet high. The waves roared ashore at twenty to thirty miles an hour with enough force to level buildings and destroy fields up to two and a half miles inland.

An Acehnese fisherman one mile out at sea described driving his boat up the steep face of one of these monster waves, already taller than a coconut tree. The fisherman said when the boat finally crested the wave, there was no back side. The top was flat and wide, the wave a huge block of water rushing shoreward with such speed that it generated its own wind, spinning up thick mist.

The wave train reached Thailand about two hours later. As with Aceh, the leading trough of the wave train arrived first. The sea began to drain away from the shore, exposing reef and seabed for up to hundreds of feet. At other places the wave crest was the first to arrive as a giant surge of water. Eleven hours after the earthquake, the tsunami still had power to take lives in South Africa, five thousand miles away from the epicenter. Pouring through continental gaps, the tsunami finally lapped gently ashore in places as far away as Brazil and Nova Scotia.

The wave train battered coastlines for several hours, striking and withdrawing, with up to thirty
minutes between crests. Receding waves carried people and debris miles out to sea.

The waves had different characteristics in different areas, depending on local topography. Several Acehnese fishermen anchored off deepwater reefs that nearly drained dry described the biggest wave as a gentle upwelling followed by violent currents. In Thailand, as captured in amateur video footage, the waves broke well offshore into churning white water that swept inland. In west Aceh survivors described the biggest second wave storming ashore on the back of the much smaller first wave like a rearing snake ready to strike them. Eyewitnesses said that when the crest finally toppled well inland, it did so with enough force to gouge trenches into the earth. They described the waves as black—their energy would have stirred up the dark volcanic sand on the coastline's seafloor.

With no warning system in place, the coastal residents and visitors in more than a dozen countries were caught unawares. The tsunami was the dead-liest in history, killing nearly a quarter of a million people and leaving over a million homeless. The majority of fatalities and the greatest destruction occurred in Aceh.

I have been to Aceh several times over the years, and spent a month as a volunteer relief aide worker
in western Aceh in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. While I draw on that experience and on countless conversations with survivors and refugees, and have tried to be accurate about the details of the quake and the ensuing tsunami based on survivors' accounts, it should be kept in mind that this is a work of fiction and not journalism. Tiger Island is a composite of several Acehnese islands, although the island's small herd of wild elephants, which are found on the Sumatran mainland, is strictly an author's imaginative touch. Meulaboh and Calang are real towns that were devastated by the tsunami, but for purposes of the story, I have rearranged somewhat the topography between them and altered some minor details. The novel's community of survivors at Calang is fictional but draws on actual events in other towns. For the sake of narrative, I have also shortened the time between the tsunami and the first significant arrival of aid.

The need in Aceh remains great. Despite generous giving, many families are still quietly, almost invisibly, suffering. I am donating a portion of my royalties from this book to one or two local organizations working at a grassroots level to help the Acehnese people.

“The need in Aceh remains great. Despite generous giving, many families are still quietly, almost invisibly, suffering. I am donating a portion of my royalties from this book to one or two local organizations working at a grassroots level to help the Acehnese people.”